Ghosts
by ghostwitch
Summary: They are not strangers, to death or to each other. Six vignettes for Aeris & Sephiroth.


**I. **

There's a woman who walks the halls of the 67th floor at night. She is thin and proud and her jaw is set with defiance, but Sephiroth remembers her from a time when none of those things were true: When the insides of her arms weren't lined with the same track marks, made with far less care and precision, as the insides of his. She remembers him, too. She looks at him with thin lips and haunted eyes and Sephiroth is certain he knows the ghost that stands behind him.

She has a young daughter, hair always in curls. There are stark metal bracelets around her narrow wrists. She has her mother's eyes. Once, they pass him in the lab and she turns to her mother and whispers behind her hand. She is far too excited to really whisper.

"See, Mom? There are other kids around here, too!"

**II. **

There's a man in black whose face looks out from a poster that hangs above her boyfriend's bed back home. "He's a hero," he tells her, eyes alight with pride and Mako. "A great man." Aeris saw him once, walking the back streets of Sector 1 - a strange place for a great man, if she was to be honest. She'd stood at the mouth of an alley, a wicker basket of yellow flowers the only thing separating her from every other miserable slumrat accosting their betters for gil.

It's the flowers that catch his eyes, so much sharper and brighter in person (but then, she already knew they would be). She's suddenly aware of how small her hands are as she reaches out with a flower held tight in one of them. "Only a gil," she assures him. There's a memory in the back of her mind of a sullen young boy on the other side of the glass, whose feet swing to and fro from the examination table. Really, she'd have given him the flower for free.

**III. **

There's an empty chair behind Hojo's desk and blood on Sephiroth's boots. It runs in his veins, too, for the first time in years, and feels all the hotter for the professor's absence. A manilla folder stamped "ANCIENT: PROMISED LAND" lies atop a scattered pile of scrawled notes and unfinished papers. Deliberately, in Sephiroth's mind.

He opens it in spite of himself, expecting to see his own face looking out from the grainy picture clipped to the inside. He is given pause. The file belongs to a different specimen. She still has her mother's eyes. He flexes his hand at his side, makes a fist and unmakes it again, grasping at something that's already slipped through his fingers.

**IV.**

There's a long-forgotten city past the tall trees in the north, with a still, clear lake at its heart. Aeris stands at it's edge and breathes it in. She wishes her skin would stop prickling. The wind carries voices, and all of them warn her of the shadow at her back. It's futile. She would have known about him, anyway.

The reeds at the far side of the bank stir, flashing silver. Aeris doesn't look. She focuses instead on the smooth round materia in her palm. It feels ready to melt into her skin, as she feels ready to melt into the earth. "I'll stop you," she vows in what she hopes is quiet fury, staring stubbornly forward. There's no reply. The bruises up and down her arms ache.

Chill wind fills the silence, blowing ripples across the water, and for a long while she stands and watches as they move through her distorted reflection. She feels herself ebbing away. The borrowed words come slow across her tongue, but her even voice rings with certainty. "'When it's time for this planet to die,'" she says, stars and galaxies drifting across her mind, "you'll understand that you know absolutely nothing.'"

The answer from the shore is born from pregnant silence: "We'll see."

**V.**

There's no time for this, he tells himself again. His fingers twitch toward the controls, the dusty room illuminated once more by the pale glow of the monitor and two voices, long since lost to memory. They talk of many things that no normal person would ever concern themselves with, both true and untrue in Sephiroth's measure. It hardly matters. It's been so very long since he heard the man's voice. Something stirs and twists within him. A distant past, a comfort he's loath to want - and yet a comfort nonetheless. All that's left ahead of him is a stretch of icy field, but the ghosts on the screen hold him rooted in place.

"_Aeris is different from the other children. I wonder what dangers await her…?"_

"_Never say that! I will protect you and Aeris no matter what!" _

He narrows his eyes against the final video. Another familiar voice, far less welcome, joins the chorus. The screen goes black and Sephiroth is alone in the pitch, listening to the sound of gunshots reverberate through the room. A woman shrieks. A baby cries. The tape clicks and goes silent and he stands in the dark, feeling blood searing through his veins. He swears he can taste it, too. He reminds himself he ought to go, that he ought to have gone before night - long and bitter and cold – closed in around Icicle Inn, and that his burning anger is as good a shield against the frigid wind as any.

The tape whirrs to life again as Sephiroth withdraws his wavering hand.

**VI.**

There were wheels put in motion a long, long time ago. He might have thought her broken upon them, but the slow pulse of the planet affirms that she has broken them in turn. She is not the same, no, but she _is_. Her hands had been small, once, but they are light and life, now, with reach beyond imagining. Her fingers crack the ground, curling and twisting towards the sky. They wind around meteor, fire and damnation so fragile in her grasp, and it crumbles to dust and embers.

They creep around his white throat like ivy.

"One with the planet, remember?" Her voice is coaxing, gentle. Victors have the luxury of kindness. He still struggles, though barely. His face is streaked with blood, eyes wide and wild. He sees her – she knows he must see her.

"Let go. Come with me."

"With _you_," he echoes, his breaking voice shaded with wonder and fury. The words choke him as much as her hands ever could.


End file.
